Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Today I’ll be talking with the folks at Namesake at 11am PST.

I hope you’ll come listen in and ask me some questions.

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True or false?  If you’re asking a favor of someone, it’s best to give them plenty of freedom in terms of how and when they do it.

I mean, it seems awfully presumptuous to not only ask for a favor, but also to ask that it be done in a specific manner in a specific timeframe.  Right?

Wrong.

Most people are happy to help with feedback or advice.   However, we are conditioned to avoid uncertainty.  We don’t like putting ourselves in situations where we may look stupid.  We’re often multitasking and thus distracted.

And the busiest people have limited time and they would prefer to spend that time on helping you with the hardest stuff, in the most efficient possible way.

Hammering out where and when to meet, or which format to write up an answer in, or which tool to use is not giving someone flexibility, it’s assigning them busywork. To be as considerate as possible and maximize your response rate, here’s what you do:

1) Tell me Who and Why

State who you are and why you’re contacting the person.  If you have a shared contact or subject matter, this is where to state it:

• “My name is Cindy Alvarez, and I’m the product manager for KISSmetrics.  Hiten Shah suggested I talk with you about ______.”
• “My name is _________, and I’m a designer who is interested in startups.  I’ve been reading your blog and was hoping I could talk to you about ________.”

This may sound ridiculously obvious, but I can point you to a bunch of emails in my inbox that didn’t start this way.  Yes, I can read the subject line of the email; I can google someone.  Why should I have to?  (Remember, people are universally busy and distracted.)

2) I’m hoping to learn…

Give a 1-2 sentence summary of what you are hoping to learn or accomplish from this exchange.

I don’t like committing to meetings or calls where I don’t know what the person wants.   I may not be able to help (Which wastes time for both of us.  Also makes me feel stupid, and if you’ve been reading this blog for long, you know that “avoidance of feeling stupid” is pretty much the driving force of human motivation.)

• “I have been trying to do customer development and would like to hear more about how I should do _________ and __________.”
• “I’d like to get some honest feedback on my ________ document.”

3) Here’s how we can connect…

Give 2-3 options of when, where, and how to meet so the person can easily just pick one.

This involves a little bit of proactive research on your part.  Figure out which city the person lives/works in (not always possible, but you can certainly try).  If you’re in a metro area, you’ll want to find venues that are convenient for both public transit and cars (i.e. readily available parking).  You’ll want to make sure there is enough space that you can get a table.  You may need wifi.

Does this sound like a lot of work?  It is, and that’s why you should do it instead of implicitly tacking it on to the favor you’re asking.

An example may look like this:

I’d love to get a half-hour of your time to talk over coffee.  Does one of these suggestions work for you?

• 9:30am on Tues, May 10 at Greenhouse Cafe in West Portal [yelp link]
• 3pm on Thurs, May 12 at Farley’s Coffeehouse in Potrero Hill [yelp link]
• 11:30am on Fri, May 13 at Starbucks near the Metreon [yelp link]
• Feel free to suggest another time — my limitation is that I don’t have a car, but I can get anywhere within San Francisco between 9am-4pm.

This gives the recipient all of the necessary information they need to make a decision: expected time outlay, times they can check against their calendar, locations (so they don’t schedule back-to-back meetings on opposite ends of town).

Odds are, this will eliminate the need for playing email tag to set up a meeting.  But even if they can’t accept one of your suggestions, you’ve laid your limitations so that they can easily propose an alternative that is likely to work.

(Second only to “avoiding feeling stupid”, I think that “avoiding back-and-forth emails” may be another of the main driving forces of human motivation.)

So, what’s the +1?

It doesn’t affect your odds of landing an initial meeting, but it certainly increases your odds of getting future ones.

Say Thanks AND Summarize What You Learned

Most people are pretty practiced at sending a thank you note after a meeting.

But what really stands out is when someone takes the extra few moments to summarize what they’ve learned from you.   This tells me a couple things — one, that you were actually listening; and two, how I could continue to help you in the future.

An example might look like:

Thank you for your time today!  I was particularly grateful for the next steps you laid out in terms of how to interview additional customers and what survey questions we can ask to learn ______ and _______.  I’m going to share my notes with my team, and we plan to start on ______ next week.

When we have a draft of _______ ready, may I share it with you?  I’d love to get your feedback and ensure that I’m applying what I learned from you correctly.

And yes — someone who has already spent their time talking to you really is interested in continuing to do so.  Think of it like investing: having bought a couple shares of you, I certainly want to see your stock price continue to rise.

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Do you have one of those acquaintances — honestly, you can’t really call them a friend — who only get in touch when they need something?

You start to dread their calls or emails.  You know they aren’t calling to ask how your day went or because they have an extra ticket to an A’s game — it’s always that they need a favor.

It doesn’t really matter if they contact you once a month or twice a year; over time, they’ve totally overdrawn their social capital with you.

But I hear from a lot of companies who say:  “We don’t survey/email/talk to our customers that often because we don’t want to annoy them.”

Really?  Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?  Do you talk to your friends only once a quarter because you might annoy them?

“Well,” you say, “that’s different.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’m not trying to sell my best friend anything.  I’m asking how her day went or inviting her to get coffee!  Maybe occasionally I ask for a favor, but she asks them of me as well!”

Of course.  With friends, you are having a balanced conversation.  There is a give-and-take of benefits.  The question is, why aren’t you behaving that way with your customers as well?

Here’s a few things to keep in mind:

One self-serving request per quarter.

I love Net Promoter Score and ‘how satisfied are you’ surveys, but let’s be honest: they are completely self-serving.  The customer is not getting any benefit from answering them.

If you ask them more often than once a quarter, you are being annoying.  Also, unless you have done a good job of explaining what you did in response to the last survey, your customers will think you care more about surveying than actually improving.

Be specific so that you can ask for the smallest possible effort from your customer.

Answering too-broad questions is hard work!  If someone asks me “what are the best restaurants in San Francisco?”, well, that’s a 10-15 minute response that I may not have time for and they may not even use.  But if someone asks “what’s a good Italian restaurant that’s not too noisy and I can get a table on a Friday night”, those constraints allow my brain to hone in an answer within a minute.

I often hear people say, “but I don’t want to limit people! Any kind of feedback is good.”  No.

“It’s hard to use” is not even remotely as useful as “I don’t know what to type in on the SMTP server configuration screen”.   You need to be disciplined enough to form hypotheses — these are the things I suspect customers are frustrated with — and ask those specific questions.

Explain ‘what’s in it for me’

• Announcing a new product?  Why should I care?
• Running a demographic survey?  How will telling you the answer benefit me?
• Asking me why I canceled my account?  Why should I bother telling you?

These are often just a matter of thinking from the recipient’s perspective and doing some rewording.

Customers don’t care about a feature list — they care that they’ll finally be able to accomplish task X.  Customers don’t care that you want to categorize them by age range — but they do care that you can tailor your product to better suit their needs.   Customers who left your service don’t care that you’ll make it better for the next customer — but they do enjoy venting.

Instead of trying to limit the number of times you contact your customers, focus your effort on rewarding them for giving you their time.   Look at the ways in which you’re talking to them.  Keep in mind that customers, like your friends, have invested energy into you and are happy to help — as long as you do the same for them.

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While at PCamp Silicon Valley last weekend, I overheard a number of conversations bemoaning “the difficulty of getting our engineers to do [what we ask]“.

Some of these product managers may have been legitimately frustrated with problems caused above their pay grade (such as VPs who overschedule engineering and make threats if deadlines aren’t met; this leads to bugs, incidentals, and new priorities being ignored and it destroys morale).  But product managers, at least some of you are the problem.

1) You over-specify the solution.

Are you telling engineers how to do their jobs?  It’s easy, in the interest of being thorough, to try and leap ahead and specify a solution.  But that often comes at the expense of under-specifying the problem that needs to be solved.  Engineers are problem solvers; figuring out the tools and implementation is what they do — much, much better than you.

Yes, you should list constraints (“40% of our traffic is viewing our site on iPads so we can’t use Flash” or “Our top 3 customers require that we use X technology because they’re already integrated with it”), but be clear when they are business requirements.

And yes, it can be helpful to say “in the past, we solved a similar requirement in this way” – but that’s a suggestion, not a requirement. (There might easily be a reason why this case is not as analogous as you think.)

2) You are wishy-washy.

You have two potential opportunities, so instead of picking one, you ask for extra flexibility “so it’ll work for both”.  This is harder to build, harder to QA, and frankly, is probably going to result in a worse user experience for your customers.

Be specific.  You can’t have two #1 priorities (well, actually, your boss may be telling you that you do, and if so, that speaks volumes about your company and your boss.  Get out as soon as you can.)

3) The last product manager blamed everything on engineering.

This one is (sadly) incredibly common.  Most engineers I’ve worked with have been burned by a bad PM in the past.  And it’s not always someone who deliberately badmouthed engineering.  It’s often that the product manager was complicit in allowing higher management to put the blame on engineering.

A deadline was missed, or the software quality was poor, and the VP of Products says “well, my team did their job” — and the product managers breathe a sigh of relief instead of coming forward and saying, “Actually, we kept increasing scope / should have done more customer research / changed priorities midway…”

This one isn’t your fault, but it is your responsibility to win back trust.  You’ll need to go out of your way to give credit to engineering for ‘wins’ and to shoulder the blame for ‘misses’ to make it clear that you are working together instead of competing against each other.

4) You don’t know when they’re making excuses.

You ask for something.  Your engineering coworkers give you an excuse why they can’t do it (maybe out of malice, but probably just because right now they’re really busy or tired) — and you fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

Their first response is going to be “Whew, I got away with it!”  Their next thought is going to be, “I can’t believe he actually fell for that.”

If you haven’t learning enough of the basics of how your programming language works / how your database works / what things are easy to change vs. hard to change to know when engineers are bluffing, they will have no respect for you.   Start asking: why is that hard?  Is this impossible or just really tedious/time-consuming/hard to test?  If I wanted to solve X, how else could we go about it?

5) You don’t negotiate.

Something unexpected will come up.  It always does.  But you hold fast to your list of requirements: 100% of this has to be done by this deadline, no exceptions.  Maybe you even say, “you’ll just have to work harder to get it all in.”  (My god, I hope you don’t say that; if you do, you deserve everything you get.)

You have to be willing to give some things up or accept alternatives.  As in #2 above, not everything is your number-one priority.  It doesn’t make you wishy-washy to cut some of your previous requirements, it makes you pragmatic.  “OK, we absolutely have to have X, Y, and Z.  How can we rework the rest of these requirements to absolutely get those things, and try to get as much as possible of the others?”

You may have read this far and be patting yourself on the back because none of these apply to you.

Don’t be so sure.  It’s awfully easy to fall into bad habits – the engineers I work with will happily point out that, despite my best intentions, I sometimes do one of these.  Be aware, and everyone will be much happier for it.

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